SurVision Magazine

News from the frontier


To wake at this precise moment –
five presences in the room, the forest around me

a sun and a moon wearing different faces
tacked up on the walls of vast 
citadels of crowded bickering houses

the light of an empty dawn
passing through all of them

beyond, wilder creatures lunging for
the gold casket buried inside my chest

in the small stillness that travels with me
I listen to a voice I can almost make out

the sad rain that falls
at the heart of the world





Nunc dimitis


It is a prayer almost.
The hands lift into air
tied to little famine-balloons
while the eyes drift off
to other landscapes
of trees and stones and
creatures climbing out of wells –
all hale and whole
in the uneven sunlight of the world.

A river descends from pool to pool
ferrying the garlands, headless dolls,
plastic bags of snapshots from our childhood,
the wide gawky black and white grin.

We are at a port where the long jetty
goes out so far we start
to lose the memory of land.

You will need to celebrate this – he said.

If I look one way
the sea has already closed over me.
If I look the other way
I am joined hand in hand
with the crowd of my dead,
welcomed home, at one
with their weeping.

It is the festival of letting go.
A thousand flowers stood up in a field
and the sun
methodically broke their necks.







On a calm winter night I am walking towards


The car is buried in the stars
We come from the hospital
We go to the crematorium
We move house and move house again
Our backs tell us how deep the trough is we must excavate
The trees grow over us
On infinite cloudless days we are taken to see our ancestors
Evenings when we have nothing they are waiting for us on
             the rambling wooden jetty where the hills have
                                                come down to inspect the sea
Their clothes glitter, their eyes are firm

Across a frozen dawn an acidic mist rises
We start in earnest
Plans are made – buildings begun and abandoned
The leaves and the ants interrupt their wars
We reach for the pure insight the pebbles are whispering

Fish know us as intimately as sunlight
Neophytes of a newt we have entered and
                passed through the water
Our hands are filled with loss and jagged
                                                explosions of strangeness
The car is buried in the stars




Peter Boyle was born in Melbourne, Australia, and grew up in Sydney. He started writing poetry in his teens. He earned an honours degree in English from Sydney University, a Diploma of Education, and an MA in Spanish and Latin American Studies. He is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Ghostspeaking (2016), Towns in the Great Desert (2013) and Apocrypha (2009). In 2017 Ghostspeaking was awarded the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Poetry. As a translator of poetry from French and Spanish he has had six books published, including Selected Poems by Olga Orozco, Marosa di Giorgio and Jorge Palma, Tokonoma and Anima by José Kozer, and The Trees by Eugenio Montejo. His translation of José Kozer's Índole was published early this year by University of Alabama Press.